So, last night on the Oscars, Seth MacFarlane hosted the event and his big "funny" number was a song titled We Saw Your Boobs, a tune wherein the alleged humor consisted of MacFarlane simply listing actresses and the movies in which they had shown their breasts on camera. It was both incredibly unfunny, and incredibly obnoxious, as witnessed by the numerous shots of very uncomfortable actresses in the audience. In many of the referenced movies, such as Silkwood, Monster, and Boys Don't Cry, the nudity was illustrative of the ways in which women in society are victimized or brutalized. But in Seth's mind, the fact that he got to see some naked boobs was enough to set all that aside and titter.
Now many people have already commented on how clumsy the supposed satire in We Saw Your Boobs, and how Seth might have made an actually insightful and biting commentary by including a segment in which he switched to something akin to We Saw Your Dick, and then noted that unlike female nudity, which has become so de rigeur that it is unusual when an actress like Jennifer Lawrence hasn't had a topless scene in a movie, male nudity is almost never seen. But the thing that struck me was just how completely juvenile and banal MacFarlane's song was. It wasn't just unfunny, it was boring. Which is why my musical selection this week is Rachel Bloom's You Can Touch My Boobies, because Rachel knows how to make a funny song about breasts.
The difference between Bloom's song and MacFarlane's song is that You Can Touch My Boobies is a fantasy that is supposed to have been spun from the mind of a sexually repressed twelve year old Jewish boy. So the fact that the humor is decidedly childish is the point. And almost everyone has been at that awkward stage where sex and the opposite gender were weird and just mentioning body parts was titillating. But most of us grow out of the idea that just saying "boobs" is funny. And guys like Seth MacFarlane apparently have not. Not only that, Rachel's song told from the perspective of a tween is more sophisticated in its humor than We Saw Your Boobs, containing several fairly witty lines and consisting of more than just saying "boobs, boobs, boobs" over and over again. And as a result, the humor of the Oscars is now more childish than the humor of a juvenile's masturbatory fantasies.
All that said, I'm not sure why Seth MacFarlane is so excited about seeing boobs, since he can see one whenever he looks in the mirror.
Previous Musical Monday: The Bed Song by Amanda Palmer
Subsequent Musical Monday: The Very Thing That Makes You Rich (Makes Me Poor) by Ry Cooder
Rachel Bloom Musical Monday Home
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